Books of The Times; Sad Life, Sad Writer: A Base in Shame and Pain

By MICHIKO KAKUTANI

Published: May 26, 1992

The Interior Castle The Art and Life of Jean Stafford By Ann Hulbert Illustrated. 430 pages. Alfred A. Knopf. $25.

Jean Stafford's body of work was small but distinguished: three completed novels, "Boston Adventure" (1944), "The Mountain Lion" (1947) and "The Catherine Wheel" (1952), and a series of short stories, published mainly in The New Yorker. Although the style shifted from book to book -- Henry James and Proust curiously alternated with Mark Twain as the dominant influences -- the fiction consistently attested to Stafford's unforgiving eye, her gift for lapidary prose, and what she called her "peculiar genius for the uncomfortable."

Her themes, as the critic Ann Hulbert points out in this judicious new biography, remained remarkably consistent over the years: again and again, Stafford returned to the questions of exile and homelessness, the self's estrangement from the world, and the simultaneous lure of solitude and dread of loneliness experienced by the marginal individual.

Those themes, of course, were deeply rooted in Stafford's own life. The youngest of four children, Stafford grew up ashamed of her family's poverty -- when she was 5 years old, her father squandered the last of his inheritance in a bad stock market investment -- and she developed a lasting resentment of her parents. While her mother's willful domesticity elicited contempt, her father's futile efforts to distinguish himself as a writer of Western adventure stories provoked a more complicated reaction. On one hand, Stafford blamed him for selfishly putting his own literary ambitions before the family's welfare; on the other hand, she found in his failed dreams the impetus for her own vocation.

A fellowship to study philology in Germany was young Stafford's ticket out of Colorado. Upon her return to the States, she decided to become a writer of fiction.

In 1940, Stafford married Robert Lowell, the poet and Boston scion. Their relationship had not begun auspiciously: Stafford suffered severe head injuries when Lowell crashed his parents' car into a wall in Cambridge, and shortly after their wedding, Lowell struck her in the face, breaking her nose again. Stafford used the experience to examine the path from bodily pain to spiritual release in one of her most autobiographical and revealing stories, "The Interior Castle."

Lowell proved to be a stern literary taskmaster. James, Proust, Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky were among the few authors who made it onto his list of acceptably serious literature, and when he embraced Catholicism he insisted on a strict devotional regimen at home that included two rosaries a day, Mass in the morning, benediction in the evening. Ambivalent about this sudden immersion in religion and often exhausted by the intense literary company Lowell liked to keep, Stafford tried to immerse herself in writing. Over the next few years she produced two of her best known works: "Boston Adventure," a dense, Jamesian Bildungsroman that details a young woman's efforts to find redemption in the rarefied air of Boston high society, and "The Mountain Lion," a densely symbolic novel about the coming of age of two strange young children in the American West.

Shortly after Stafford finished "The Mountain Lion," some sort of violent exchange seems to have occurred in her marriage. Stafford, Ms. Hulbert writes, "claimed that Lowell beat her up and threatened to kill her." Whatever happened, it's clear that marital tensions had dramatically escalated. Stafford, on her part, was drinking heavily, and Lowell seems to have become increasingly moody and withdrawn. He soon took up with a mutual friend named Gertrude Buckman, and Stafford left their house in Maine for New York, where she checked herself into the Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic.

Her literary success provided little solace. "Why should it console me to be praised as a good writer?" she wrote her estranged husband. "There is no thing worse for a woman than to be deprived of her womanliness," she added. "For me, there is nothing worse than the knowledge that life holds nothing for me but being a writer."

This fear that she lacked the talent for loving and being loved, Ms. Hulbert reports, haunted Stafford the rest of her life, though she went on to marry two more times and found at least a modicum of happiness with her third husband, the journalist A. J. Liebling.

After Liebling's death, Stafford's life became increasingly solitary. She petulantly severed ties with her family, began writing a series of cranky magazine articles and spent more and more time drinking alone in her house in East Hampton. In the end, even language, which for so long had been her salvation, failed her: she was unable to complete the long autobiographical novel she had labored on for years, and in 1976 she suffered a debilitating stroke that left her virtually unable to speak.

Unlike David Roberts's 1988 biography of the author, "The Interior Castle" does not dwell unnecessarily on the distressing facts of Stafford's life. Ms. Hulbert, a senior editor at The New Republic, devotes the bulk of this volume to an examination of Stafford's fiction and the imaginative transactions she made between her experiences and her art.

Though the reader may quibble with some of Ms. Hulbert's critical opinions -- her characterization of "The Catherine Wheel" as a "slow, oddly hollow novel," for instance, is surely open to dispute -- Ms. Hulbert writes knowledgeably about Stafford's fiction. She deftly depicts the literary circles within which Stafford came of age (including the Fugitive poets, the New Critics and the Partisan Review crowd); cannily examines the influence that such friends and mentors as John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate and Peter Taylor had on Stafford's work, and astutely explicates the parallels to be found in Stafford's fiction and Lowell's verse.

The writing in "The Interior Castle" is elegant and assured, the assessments at once intelligent, sympathetic and informed. All in all, a beautifully rendered biography of a writer who deserves a new generation of readers.